The Metamorphoses
« … Car rien ne se crée, ni dans les opérations de l'art, ni dans celles de la nature »
— Lavoisier, Traité élémentaire de chimie (1789), p. 140/141
Site-specific installation – oxidized copper, platform, space and bodies in motion
A series of slender oxidized copper tubes, suspended in space like the columns of a vanished era, rise from a pale platform within a minimal, silent environment. Copper — living and mutable — sheds its skin: from polished to dull, from warm to green, from present to past. It is the metal of metamorphosis.
In this suspended time, matter becomes a narrative of life. Each rod is a filament of history: a vertical body bearing witness to the passing of time, the corrosion of waiting, the beauty of oxidation. Nothing remains unchanged. All evolves.
Visitors move around, beyond, and between. Their blurred figures become shifting presences, shadows in motion, lives flowing beside structures that resist and transform in unison. The work lives in the contrast between the ephemerality of the body and the slowness of metal, between the human and the inorganic.
The Metamorphoses is an installation that does not shout, but whispers an ancient truth:
We are no longer what we were, nor yet what we will be. In the meantime, we are pure change.